Earlier in October, I announced that I’d be donating all site earnings to the Grameen Foundation in celebration of Mr. Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank’s 2006 Nobel Peace Prize award. First, thanks to everyone for making it a record earnings month for Experiments in Finance and contributing to this worthy cause. It was the first month I broke the 3-figure barrier and if I can keep this up, maybe can make it to becoming a four-figure blogger.

I’m happy to report that I was wrong in my prediction that I’d have only Adsense earnings to contribute. Here’s how Experiments in Finance’s revenues broke down for October:

Because affiliates have thresholds for disbursing payments, it so happens that I didn’t cross any of them and won’t be getting paid for these amounts for another month at least. But, bad as this might be in terms of revenue recognition, I felt it was right to go ahead and make the donation to the Grameen Foundation as promised. I’m big on transparency, so here’s the screen shot confirming the donation amount (click to enlarge):

Traffic for Experiments in Finance also grew to a record 6,654 visitors (12,219 page views) in October.

So again, thanks to everyone for making this such a successful project!

I doubt I’ll ever be up for a 24-hour blogathon, but having another earnings-for-charity month will probably happen again here in the not-too-distant future.

Finally, if you’re looking for the graph that used to appear on the upper-left sidebar, I’ve decided to just embed it in my earnings posts from now on. Here it is, below, an anticlimactic denouement for this post :)

[…] Personally, I’d lump the donations we’ve given this year into three categories: donations as part of friends’ marathons, bike relays, and wedding gifts to various health-related charities; donations to microfinance organizations (like the Grameen Foundation); and one-time, larger donations outright to organizations we believe in. What I’ll say is that our donations tend to be opportunistic rather than planned and driven, and that’s something we need to improve upon. […]

The term ‘payroll’ encompasses every employee of a company who receives a regular wage or other compensation. Some employees may be paid a steady salary while others are paid for hours worked or the number of items produced. All of these different pa…